Milwaukee Bucks head coach Jason Kidd has invested an undisclosed amount in golf startup 18Birdies after meeting the CEO at a celebrity golf tournament earlier this year.
A 10-time NBA All-Star as a player, Kidd has been passionate about golf for a long time and has used technology to improve his game.
In an interview with SportTechie, Kidd wrote that he has been playing golf since he was a freshman in high school after discovering the sport through his basketball coach, who also coached golf at his school, and one of his basketball teammates who ranked top in the state for golf.
“Collectively, they got me hooked on the sport,” Kidd wrote.
That passion led him to play in several celebrity golf tournaments over the past few years, including the American Century Championships earlier this year, where he was paired with 18Birdies CEO Eddy Lui during one of the Pro-Arms and was introduced to the app for the first time.
“Right away I saw how it can help a golfer out. I liked how the app went beyond just score tracking and includes other ways to make the golf experience more fun like being able to easily calculate side games,” Kidd wrote. “I like to bet on the course, so that feature was huge for me.”
According to Kidd, he also found the 18Birdies GPS rangefinder, which shows users the exact distances to different points on a hole, helpful in planning out his shots, and Track Shot to be a cool feature that showed exactly how far he was hitting the ball.
“With both of those features, I’m better able to navigate a course and use the right club,” he wrote.
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Kidd is the second celebrity athlete investor to announce a stake in the golf app this year, following golf legend Ernie Els’ investment in June.
According to Kidd, he’s a silent investor in a number of other companies and is always on the lookout for business opportunities with companies that align with his values.
“Technology has been used to improve many different industries from hospitality to retail to transportation and golf should be no different,” Kidd wrote.